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Ultra-low tides bring rare chance to walk to an island lighthouse

Ultra-low tides bring rare chance to walk to an island lighthouse. A rare chance to walk 1 kilometre [0.62 of a mile] offshore to an island lighthouse attracts thousands of trekkers to a North Queensland town. Extremely low winter tides will make the walk to the North Head Island lighthouse at Bowen possible for five days this year.

Bill Reid print in Lego? Yes, please!

Henry Campbell, a New Brunswick high school student, has used 15,000 pieces of Lego to recreate an iconic Bill Reid print as part of a school project. Before he started the project, he had received permission from Reid's estate for the recreation.

Bill Reid Gallery Instagram CBC The National news clip (YouTube, 1:27 min) Background: Who was Bill Reid? From the Wikipedia page, "William Ronald Reid Jr. (12 January 1920 – 13 March 1998) also known as Iljuwas, was a Haida artist whose works include jewelry, sculpture, screen-printing, and paintings. Producing over one thousand original works during his fifty-year career, Reid is regarded as one of the most significant Northwest Coast artists of the late twentieth century." Iconic Bill Reid works: Spirit of Haida Gwaii (be sure to scroll down to the picture of people standing next to it so you can see the scale of the sculpture) The Raven and the First Men

How to Predict the Weather in Our Era of Freakish Storms

I didn't want to have to depend on a weather app to know when the storms are coming. [slNYTGift]

Colossal

The best of art, craft, and visual culture since 2010.

Lucy Sparrow Invokes ’90s Supermarket Nostalgia in ‘The Beginning of Convenience’

Lucy Sparrow Invokes ’90s Supermarket Nostalgia in ‘The Beginning of Convenience’

Bentonville is a small town in Northwest Arkansas that has, over time, become synonymous with massive retail operations and corporate ecosystems. The bustling hub is ingrained with the legacy of Walton’s, a small nickel and dime convenience store that opened on Bentonville’s downtown square in 1950 to serve its surrounding community. The shop quickly found success, and owner Sam Walton opened another store nearby that would evolve into the largest retailer in the world: Walmart.

During this time and throughout the ’60s, a post-war boom overtook the burgeoning commercial landscape of the United States. The suburban American Dream became a catalyst for retailers to adapt to an evolving social fabric that aimed to serve families hunting for necessities at an affordable price, and in a pinch. As a result, various amenities were introduced to convenience stores and chains, including the emergence of self-serve gasoline pumps.

a collection of handmade felt plush sculptures by Lucy Sparrow replicating a supermarket aisle stocked with various products and produce
Installation view of ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Wesley Hitt, courtesy of Getty Images for The Momentary

The 1980s and ’90s, however, ushered in a new frontier of American commerce rooted in modernization. Supermarkets began to resemble the eptiome of a “one-stop-shop,” significantly transcending previous notions of convenience. In just one trip to the store, busy parents had the ability to pick out groceries for the week, restock housekeeping supplies, fill prescriptions, and feed their families lunch at the food court—all while waiting for their vacation photos to develop via rapid film processing. Securing a quick and easy premade dinner was possible thanks to the popular frozen food aisle, and as a cherry on top, VHS movies were available for purchase to pair with the titular “TV dinner.”

U.K.-based artist Lucy Sparrow refers to this moment as “the beginning of convenience,” which doubles as the title of her newest large-scale installation and first museum exhibition in the United States. The Beginning of Convenience at The Momentary calls to the nostalgia of regional chain stores, retro packaging aesthetics, and a time when life was, as the artist described at the show’s opening, “becoming more about enjoyment and less about toil.”

For many, modern grocery stores can be imposing, and Sparrow’s monumental assemblage conjures a similar feeling of being carried away. The immensity of The Beginning of Convenience, however, invokes feelings of joy and comfort, rather than a newfangled sensory overload. Stocked to the brim with more than 20,000 handmade objects, an expansive collection of soft, felt artworks take over a 4,000-square-foot gallery space, creating an immersive experience for visitors—or, more fittingly—shoppers.

Much of the magic comes from the painstaking details that work together in molding an all-out sensory experience. For instance, as viewers weave through the aisles, music in the style of old-school supermarket beats hums in the background. The music however, is occasionally interrupted with amusing, familiar intercom announcements in a fuzzy tone, calling the parents or guardians of a lost young girl named Lucy to make their way to the photo department.

a collection of handmade felt plush sculptures by Lucy Sparrow replicating VHS tapes of iconic movies
Installation view of ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Wesley Hitt, courtesy of Getty Images for The Momentary

At the opening earlier this month, the artist was dressed for the occasion wearing a light blue, collared button-down shirtdress with vertical stripes running down the middle. Sparrow and her team shared that the custom garment was inspired by original Walmart uniforms from the company’s archives, extending a subtle nod to the fitting location of the exhibition.

Sparrow wields a remarkable ability to craft welcoming spaces for quite literally anyone. Each of the artist’s renowned installations over the years are the brainchild of her own imaginative world, and a sense of vulnerability comes with our invitation into it. “Lucy’s work is quirky yet subversive,” says an exhibition statement. “Her soft and colorful felt creations charm and disarm visitors, while her detailed research practice and incisive observations inspire strong feelings of nostalgia, community, and conversations around shared history.”

This deeply humane feeling is refreshing within the context of American consumerism and growing corporatism. Especially as of late, the simple task of grocery shopping has become an increasingly divisive experience, and for many Americans, trips to the store are a looming reminder of shrinking household budgets and soaring prices, making it nearly impossible to associate ordinary retail environments with anything but exhaustion or stress.

The presence of joy and childlike wonder in The Beginning of Convenience offers a significant subversion. Injecting this feeling into a visceral environment allows each viewer to shift their focus to enjoyment, the marvels of retail innovation, and the nostalgia that comes with it.

Installation view of ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Jackie Andres

Evoking the emotional power of soft toys, felt as a material inspires feelings of warmth and security. While walking through Sparrow’s produce and meat department, this impression seems nearly impossible to ignore as netted bags of oranges, piles of juicy grapefruits, and fresh cuts of pork chop look up at you with shy smiles.

Because of this, it seems easy to tap into an imaginative world where many of Sparrow’s plush products unmistakably possess individual souls. Perhaps the Georgia peaches have a more bubbly personality than their spiky pineapple neighbors, and, conceivably, the beef steaks across the aisle may be tough on the outside but tender at heart. Somehow anything seems possible in a world that melds the energetic spirit of commercialism with the with the slow, mindful creation of the same objects through cutting, stuffing, sewing, and embellishing.

Upon exiting the supermarket experience, viewers encounter even more felt versions of common items within grocery store vestibules: vending machines dispensing your choice of Coke or Pepsi products, a photobooth, a coin-operated mechanical car ride, and an electronic ATM, which, at the time, was reaching its ubiquity.

Turning a corner into the separate area, visitors are met with a massive floor-to-ceiling installation of more than 3,000 stuffed bananas. The sight is a recreation of the artist’s “Banana Room,” a comforting place in her studio to relax and “be surrounded by happiness,” she says. Sparrow received her first plush banana when she was nine years old as a present from her father, and later received a larger version who was named Sebastian. Sebastian’s presence throughout the show and as a mascot for the artist’s practice is further proof of the unfaltering childlike wonder imbued within every corner of Sparrow’s practice.

Luct Sparrow sits in a room filled with thousands of bananas
Lucy Sparrow at ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Wesley Hitt, courtesy of Getty Images for The Momentary

Across from the Banana Room sits a replica of the “Felt Cave.” The space—previously an ambulance station that was converted into Sparrow’s studio—offers more insight into Sparrow’s artistic process and the teamwork that goes into creating thousands of objects, one at a time. Sparrow is supported by five full-time assistants, four cats, freelancers, and, of course, Sebastian.

Along with a faux window displaying the exact view from the studio—overlooking two colorful cars frequently parked outside, including a hot pink Jeep sporting a “F3LT U” license plate—The Felt Cave is filled with thousands more surprises. As the exhibition label notes, there is “an ‘HR Department’ of bespectacled bananas, a canary yellow cuckoo clock, and ‘dab dabs’—abstract paintings created from dabbing the excess off the tip of a paint bottle.”

The Beginning of Convenience is on view through July 11, 2027.

a collection of handmade felt plush sculptures by Lucy Sparrow replicating a supermarket aisle stocked with various products and produce
Installation view of ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Wesley Hitt, courtesy of Getty Images for The Momentary
a collection of many handmade felt plush objects by Lucy Sparrow replicating packs of Hubba Bubba bubble gum
“Hubba Bubba,” 2026. Image courtesy of the artist
Installation view of ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Jackie Andres
Installation view of ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Jackie Andres
a collection of handmade felt plush sculptures by Lucy Sparrow replicating a supermarket aisle stocked with products with a wet floor sign in the shape of a banana
Installation view of ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Wesley Hitt, courtesy of Getty Images for The Momentary
a collection of many handmade felt plush objects by Lucy Sparrow replicating cans of Dole sliced pineapples
“Dole Pineapple,” 2026. Image courtesy of the artist
Installation view of ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Jackie Andres
Installation view of ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Jackie Andres
a collection of many handmade felt plush objects by Lucy Sparrow replicating Chiquita bananas
“Bananas,” 2026. Image courtesy of the artist
a collection of many handmade felt plush objects by Lucy Sparrow replicating cans of Spam Lite
“Spam Lite,” 2026. Image courtesy of the artist
Lucy Sparrow poses in an aisle of felt products and produce in her installation of 'The Beginning of Convenience'
Lucy Sparrow at ‘The Beginning of Convenience.’ Photo by Wesley Hitt, courtesy of Getty Images for The Momentary

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Lucy Sparrow Invokes ’90s Supermarket Nostalgia in ‘The Beginning of Convenience’ appeared first on Colossal.

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

DEF CON Bans Meta-Style 'Pervert Glasses'

DEF CON has banned "Meta-style glasses with recording capabilities," with no exceptions being made even for those with prescription versions. "Be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them," DEF CON said. The Register reports: [The conference's official photo policy] has not been updated since 2023, predating the recent growth of camera-equipped eyewear developed by Meta with EssilorLuxottica under its Ray-Ban and Oakley brands. It states that public photography is permitted but with several caveats that essentially prohibit capturing the image of anyone, except on-stage speakers, unless the photographer obtains consent from the subject(s). "Love to see a 'no pervert glasses' policy at DEF CON," said EFF director of cybersecurity Eva Galperin.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search

GrapheneOS is defending its duress-password feature after an environmental activist used it to wipe his Pixel phone during a U.S. Customs search and was later indicted for allegedly destroying property under government control. The nonprofit says the operating system is "completely legal," cannot recover the erased data, and should not be weakened with encryption backdoors. Meanwhile, the activist faces up to five years in prison if found guilty. PCMag reports: In a post on Saturday, the Canadian nonprofit behind the operating system, the GrapheneOS Foundation, explained that the software offers a range of features to prevent data extraction. For example, one safeguard is the "auto-reboot timer" that'll reboot a locked device after a set period of time to put the data at rest, leaving all files inside encrypted.

The group's post subtly suggests that GrapheneOS phones can withstand law enforcement searches without requiring users to resort to a duress password. "People should carefully consider how to use it in an actual duress situation where there can be physical or legal consequences for wiping the device," the nonprofit wrote. "GrapheneOS doesn't require it to protect data from being extracted from the device, but it takes recovering it completely off the table even with the PIN/password for each profile on the device."

On X, the nonprofit has also said it can do nothing to help US law enforcement recover data from Tunick's phone. "Data cannot be recovered after the key derivation material is reliably wiped. It's not possible and there's nothing we can do to assist with it," the group wrote. "Similarly, it's not possible to assist with bypassing encryption because the hardware and software has been designed to prevent it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Review Roundup: Framework Laptop 13 Pro

The review embargo has lifted for the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro, and the consensus across the board is that it is a massive leap forward in terms of build quality and battery life. The main issue reviewers complained about is the sky-high price, with the higher-end model jumping dramatically from $2,100 up to $2,900 due to the memory shortage crisis. (Some note that the price "nearly doubled" overnight while they were in the middle of testing.)

In his video review, Marques Brownlee says, "This is their best build yet. They're finally doing what people have been asking for: a premium... modular... laptop." ZDNET agrees that this device "represents a new approach for Framework and a maturation of the brand's catalog," noting that the new construction is "sleek and airtight, with no gaps, spaces, or evidence that was even put together by your hands at all." Tom's Hardware echoes this enthusiasm, declaring that "The Framework Laptop 13 Pro's sturdy design, haptic trackpad, and bigger battery feel like they should have been there all along".

Battery life, which has historically been a weak point for Framework, is now a standout feature. Ars Technica points out that the combination of Intel's efficient Panther Lake chips and a new 74-watt-hour battery is "finally long enough to decisively eliminate 'mediocre-to-poor battery life' as the laptop's biggest downside." They also said it's "Framework's nicest-looking, nicest-feeling, most polished laptop design."

For Linux users, the machine appears to deliver on its promises. Phoronix says the device "is designed with great Linux compatibility in mind," offering a seamless out-of-the-box experience for distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora.

As mentioned above, the overarching complaint is the extreme cost. Ars Technica notes that Framework unfortunately "switched to an exotic new upgradeable LPDDR5X RAM format just in time for those modules to become astronomically expensive." Still, Marques Brownlee summarizes the long-term value proposition perfectly: while it might be painfully expensive on day one, "the longer you keep this laptop, the more it feels worth it" because you can easily repair and upgrade it over time. Compared to Apple's flagship, the Framework is "80% of the quality, way more modular," he says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Madonna blijkt Nederlands in het StamCafé

Social

En toen waren ineens alle Nederlandse showmedia in rep en roer wegens een vage aankondiging van Madonna in het Nederlands. Ze wil ons iets vertellen, maar wil nog niet vertellen wat ze wil vertellen en het is allemaal erg vaag. Wellicht heeft de toch wel uitgerangeerde kwien of pop besloten om zich volledig te storten op de Nederlandse markt, misschien gaat ze alleen nog maar nummers van Nick en Simon coveren, misschien neemt ze de vastgoedportefeuille van prins Bernhard over, misschien wordt ze de nieuwe burgemeester van Terneuzen, misschien tekent ze een lucratief contract bij de NPO of heeft het allemaal tóch iets met de World Pride in Amsterdam te maken. We zullen wel zien wat er dadelijk aan onze reedt geroest zit. Goed nummer wel, Believe.

Social

Misschien koopt Madonna de vuurtoren van Schiermonnikoog?

Social

Infantino zet WK te koop, iedereen boos

Een nieuwe dag, een nieuwe manier om het voetbal nog dooier maken dan het al is. Gianni Infantino zit nog in een rush na dat mega succesvolle pracht-WK en wil de wereldbeker nu in de verkoop zetten. De FIFA, een Zwitserse non-profit die op elk toernooi verlies draait behalve het WK, moet een FIFA-bedrijf oprichten met de naam FIFA Forward Enterprise. Private investeerders kunnen daar miljoenenmiljarden inpompen en daarmee kan de FIFA vervolgens het WK organiseren om die miljoenenmiljarden in nog veel meer miljoenenmiljarden te veranderen. U mag 3x raden in welke kringen de eerste investeerders worden gezocht. Juist. Afijn iedereen boos en de UEFA woest en de voetbalbonden nog opvallend stil maar die gaan dadelijk gewoon tekenen bij het kruisje. Straks gewoon weer naar een of ander corrupt kudtland voor een corrupt kudttoernooi en kudthartjes onder een kudtpost van die kudtvoorzitter plaatsen want het gaat uiteindelijk om de sport, of zo.

Social

En toen kwam woke voor de Hela curry knijpfles...

Social

Wie dacht dat er in dit land helemaal niks meer over was wat nog kapot kan worden gemaakt door WOKE, komt bedrogen uit. Al jaren verkoopt Hela uit Venlo haar Kruiden Ketchup Curry sauzen in een cilindervormige fles met een eenvoudige dop. Als je de Hela Kruiden Ketchup Curry rechtop in de koelkast bewaart, betekent dit dat het na een tijdje even duurt tot de curry eruit komt, en als de curry er dan uitkomt heb je opeens meer curry dan je dacht omdat je zo ongeduldig was. Als je Hela Kruiden Ketchup Curry ondersteboven in de koelkast bewaart en je doet de dop open, heb je in één keer een hele dot curry op je bord. Wat je natuurlijk moet doen is de fles curry ondersteboven in de koelkast bewaren, maar hem dan vlak voor je hem nodig hebt even omdraaien, zodat je daarna snel de juiste dosering saus op je bord en/of snack en/friet kunt gieten. Dat is gewoon hoe het werkt. Dat is Nederland. Dat is curry. Dat is Hela. Maar nee. Volgens ene 'Giovanni' op het internet is dat niet goed genoeg. Hij wil dat Hela zich aanpast aan de eisen van deze nieuwe tijd waarin curry kopen niet meer draait om het verhaal, om de beleving, om de intensiteit van de culturele ervaring, maar alleen maar om zonder moeite de juiste dosering saus te kunnen schenken. Dacht het niet Giovanni. Houdt Hela Hela. Stop deze gekte.

Typische wokiaanse ontkenning van wokisme

Go woke, go broke


‘Wij dachten echt: wat gebeurt hier?’ En niet alleen in de ggz heerst onrust over een minister die opleidingsplaatsen schrapt

Bij de Zeeuwse ggz-instelling Emergis lopen ze er elke dag tegenaan: het tekort aan gespecialiseerde gezondheidszorgpsychologen. De ggz in Nederland hoeft volgens een adviesorgaan niet te groeien, maar heeft voor de zwaardere problematiek wel beter opgeleide psychologen nodig. Toch sloeg zorgminister Mirjam Sterk (CDA) dit advies in de wind.


How the American right came to hate empathy

…while practising its oldest form.


Poolse oud-premier Morawiecki verlaat oppositiepartij PiS en neemt 43 parlementariërs mee

Als oppositiepartij slaagt de nationaal-conservatieve partij PiS er niet in om zichzelf te vernieuwen. Een richtingenstrijd tussen hardliners en gematigden leidt nu tot een scheuring binnen de partij die Polen liet botsen met Brussel.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

War machines can run amok with AI in control

AIs not only make life-and-death targeting decisions on the battlefield, but also involve humans in only some stages of the decision-making process. To illustrate how that happens and prompt greater scrutiny of model-enabled killing, Airwars, a not-for-profit transparency watchdog, has published a detailed report, taking apart the ways machine learning powers modern warfare. The investigation, titled Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain, offers a visual guide through a fictitious kill chain – the steps real militaries go through to identify targets and eliminate them, with an emphasis on decisions delegated to AI. Authors Sophia Goodfriend, Heidy Khlaaf, Namir Shabibi, Joe Dyke, and Nathan Walker cover six stages: the decision support systems used to assist data gathering, surveillance technology, intelligence and identification, target selection, strikes on targets, and post-strike assessments. The report notes, "A recent book about US military AI revealed that in some operations only two of the six stages of the US military kill chain now involved humans in the loop, with a third involving some human oversight. The rest are now fully automated." Given that targeting mistakes have been widely documented, it's worth wondering whether AI is making such errors more common. And since military officials have, in the past, insisted AI's role cannot be known, there's reason to look for ways to better understand when AI is involved in life-and-death decisions. "In journalism and in policy, there's a tendency to focus on maybe one autonomous weapon system, like an Anduril drone or a Palantir anomaly detection system, and to look at the specific companies that are producing a few single machine learning algorithms that are undergirding those systems," said Sophia Goodfriend, research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Pembroke College and co-author of the report, in a phone interview with The Register. "What we wanted to do … is to really underscore the stack of AI systems that are upending what it means to wage war, specifically what it means to surveil, target, and kill on the battlefield, and also emphasize how various technologies work together or don't work together throughout the kill chain." The project's goal, she said, is to look beyond specific technical systems at the way warfare is mediated by machine learning algorithms and to highlight the specific limitations of those systems. For each stage of the kill chain, the report touches on sources of potential errors: the reliability and accuracy of decision support systems, automated translation errors during surveillance of a target's text messages, target risk scoring systems derived from algorithmic assessment of social media data, computer vision systems that may misidentify objects and people, the shortcomings of recurrent neural networks used during drone strikes when there's GPS and/or electronic jamming, and the potential problems with AI-assisted battle damage assessment systems. The specific kill chain described is fictitious, but Goodfriend said that this was necessary to avoid making overreaching claims about how specific militaries operate. "Obviously it's hard to reconstruct proprietary systems used by militaries in real time today because they are often censored and secret and reporters cannot pry open exactly how a military is operating," she said, adding that she hopes the report prompts people to question claims about having a human in the loop. "What comes across in this piece is just how difficult it is for a human to intervene in a machine learning decision, the pernicious problem of automation bias, especially under the time constraint of war, and just how thoroughly everything is mediated by AI and automation already on the battlefield," she said. "So even if you have somebody who's reviewing a risk profiling system by looking at a social media post, that social media post will be translated by a machine learning algorithm and they won't be able to verify if that translation is correct because they're dealing with this time constraint and it will be really tempting and much easier to defer to an AI-generated output." Goodfriend acknowledges that it's difficult for civilians to make decisions about technologies they use that might amplify physical safety risks from military AI systems. That's why, she said, it's important to draw attention to the way these systems work. "The stack of AI systems integrated into warfare are the subject of a lot of hype and a lot of mystique and it's rare for those making or deploying these systems to really break down how they actually operate it and what it entails for civilians living under warfare," she said. "So, in illustrating how these technologies work, the massive amounts of data, of people's private information, of passive surveillance that is the foundation and lifeblood of automated warfare, I think that that's one way of moving the needle in terms of advocacy." The other key takeaway of the report, she said, is to underscore that machine learning systems make errors. "The point is not that these are teething problems that will be mitigated or ironed out once these technologies are deployed more and refined more, but really to emphasize the inherent flaws of machine learning and how they can't perform the tasks that militaries expect them to perform when they're deployed on the battlefield," she said. ®

Microsoft and Wiz mind-meld agents catch more than 90% of bugs

Two agentic bug-hunting systems from Microsoft and Google-owned Wiz show that when it comes to finding and remediating software vulnerabilities, at least two models’ minds work better than one - and Wiz tells us it’s adding a third. Wiz on Monday said Project Atlas, its bug-hunting AI agent, bested Anthropic’s Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber with its vulnerability-analysis skills, achieving a 90.9 percent success rate on CyberGym, and uncovering more than 200 zero-day security holes in widely used open-source code. Meanwhile, Microsoft boasted its MDASH bug-hunting harness scored a 95.95 percent success rate on CyberGym, also beating Mythos, Gemini and GPT on the same benchmark for evaluating how well AI systems find real vulnerabilities in the code. For comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber scored 85.6 percent on CyberGym, and its GPT-5.6 Sol scored 83.6 percent. Anthropic’s Mythos 5 reproduced the target vulnerability on 83.8 percent of CyberGym challenges. And Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber in CodeMender achieved an 83.2 percent success rate. The secret to both Atlas and MDASH’s success, according to the vendors, is that they use the right model for the right security job. Atlas uses Claude Opus 4.6 with GPT-5.5, Nir Ohfeld, head of vulnerability research at Wiz, told The Register. “We're now working to incorporate Gemini, which is well timed given Wiz's recent work with DeepMind on Gemini Flash Cyber,” he added. Microsoft’s MDASH - a combination of red-team agents that find and simulate real, exploitable vulnerabilities and attack paths, and green-team agents that remediate the issues - combines MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, based on Microsoft AI (MAI)’s internally developed MAI-Thinking-1 reasoning model, and GPT-5.4. MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is designed to handle up to 90 percent of all tasks, with MDASH detecting, patching, and validating vulnerabilities before handing the remaining 10 percent of more complex tasks to the larger GPT-5.4. “We were able to take an off-the-shelf model, within our harness, a multi-agent and multi-model implementation, and we achieved the best results you could have,” Hayete Gallot, executive vice president of Microsoft Security, said on Monday. Atlas isn’t commercially available yet - it’s used internally, and stems from Wiz’s efforts to understand how frontier models can be used for advanced code scanning. But it’s proof that “no single model is best at everything, and none stays state of the art for long,” Ohfeld and fellow Wiz kid Yuval Avrahami wrote in a Monday blog. The cloud security biz evaluates every new model using its internal benchmarking tool, Cyber Model Arena, which scores each one on its success at completing various security-investigation tasks: threat modeling, hunting, validation, and proof generation. “The results are rarely uniform: the model that reasons best through a complex exploit chain is often not the one that triages most precisely,” the duo wrote. “Atlas routes each stage to whichever model wins on that task.” In addition to doing a better job of finding and fixing vulnerabilities, a multi-model system also saves customers’ money, according to Microsoft and Wiz. Combining its much smaller, in-house model with GPT-5.4 halves customers’ costs, according to Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI. “As the models hand off between each other, they are not just able to deliver better performance than all of the other models combined, they do so at 50 percent of the cost,” he said on Monday. And while “each new generation of models expands what is possible,” they are also expensive, Ohfeld told us. “We have also learned that pointing a frontier model at a codebase once is not a sustainable security strategy: deep scans are expensive, their results become stale as code changes by the minute, and a point-in-time analysis cannot provide the continuous coverage organizations need across every repository,” he said. In fact, the real question for code security shouldn’t be which model a scanner uses, Ohfeld added. It’s this: “How does your system take advantage of the best model available today, continuously and economically, and what continues to work when a better one arrives,” he said. “That is the bet behind Atlas: frontier-model depth where expert reasoning is required, an architecture that improves as models evolve, and rigorous validation so every finding arrives with evidence, not just a plausible answer.” ®

The Eye of Pizza is, Once Again, Upon You

As you may recall, my beloved Gakken World Eye shit the bed during a power failure a couple weeks ago, after having been on 24/7 for nine years. Since these are going for almost a thousand dollars on eBay, my first attempt was to buy the cheapest desktop video projector I could find (HY300 Pro, $30) but that projector threw too small an image, and couldn't focus closer than about 2½ feet.

So then I ordered the cheapest fisheye camera lens I could find (49mm wide angle macro, $30) whose smaller lens was just slightly larger than the output lens of the projector. Success! It worked the first time.

(Someone who knew what they were doing might have looked at the focal length and done math to determine what kind of lens was needed. I very much did not do that. But I got lucky!)

I enlarged the various holes to make the new lens fit inside the dome, and got an 82mm to 95mm step-up adapter ring to screw onto the front of the fisheye, to have something I could drill into to hold it in place inside the dome. Then I cut the old electronics housing in half and dremeled out all of the interior greeblies to have a sleeve to slip over the new projector. The rest is duct tape.

I had to open up the new projector to extend the IR receiver into the dome, since, like the old eyeball, it doesn't remember its settings and you have to manually select HDMI on a remote after a power failure.

The image is 16:9 and doesn't fill the whole dome, and it's a little fuzzy on the edges, but for eyeball purposes, it's close enough. Once I get an ethernet cable in there, I'm going to see what tweaks I can make on the image in software to make it fill the frame a little better.

Previously, previously.

VK: Voorpagina

Volkskrant.nl biedt het laatste nieuws, opinie en achtergronden

Oman en Iran komen met tegengestelde voorstellen over beheer Straat van Hormuz

Bedreigingen als drukmiddel zijn onaanvaardbaar in de besluitvorming over asielopvang

Het label ‘aanstelleritis’ doet de zorg meer kwaad dan goed

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Buitenlandministers Oekraïne en Iran bellen na incident met schip

KYIV (ANP) - De Oekraïense minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Andri Sybiha zegt een "openhartig" gesprek te hebben gevoerd met zijn Iraanse ambtgenoot Abbas Araghchi. Dat gesprek volgde op een boze reactie vanuit Iran nadat Oekraïne een vrachtschip aanviel op de Kaspische Zee. Daarbij zou een Iraniër zijn omgekomen.

Minstens een andere persoon raakte volgens Iran gewond. Het land noemde de aanval een daad van agressie en dreigde met een reactie te komen.

"Diplomatie draait om directe gesprekken, ook wanneer het moeilijk is", schrijft Sybiha op X. "Ik heb benadrukt dat het ons doel is om onnodige escalatie te voorkomen." Ook Araghchi maakte melding van het telefoongesprek op sociale media, maar hij vermeldde daar niet bij wat er is besproken.

Volgens Sybiha is het doel van Oekraïne alleen om de Russische agressie, "wat de hoofdoorzaak is van alle incidenten", tegen te gaan. Hij zou hebben gezegd dat alle steun aan Rusland moet stoppen. Iran geldt als bondgenoot van Rusland.